Quotes, Sayings, and Proverbs

About Geno Auriemma

Luigi "Geno" Auriemma is an American college basketball coach and the head coach of the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team. He has led UConn to seven NCAA Division I national championships, and has won six national Naismith College Coach of the Year awards. Auriemma was also the head coach of the United States women's national basketball team from 2009 to 2012, winning the 2010 World Championship, and the gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics.
He emigrated with his family to Norristown, Pennsylvania, U.S. when he was seven years old and spent the rest of his childhood there. After graduating from West Chester University of Pennsylvania in 1977, Auriemma was hired as an assistant coach at Saint Joseph's University, where he worked in 1978 and 1979. He then took a two-year absence from college basketball, serving as an assistant coach at his former high school, Bishop Kenrick, before assuming an assistant coaching position with the University of Virginia Cavaliers in 1981. Auriemma became a naturalized United States citizen in 1994, noting in his autobiography that he finally decided to naturalize when his UConn team was slated to tour Italy that summer and he was concerned about potential problems because he had never done any required national service.

I'm glad that she's been patient enough and not kind of succumb to what a lot of coaches succumb to. Which is at the first sign of success they jump up to what they think is a greener pasture -- a big-time job somewhere else. But she's been patient enough to kind of build something that's going to be long lasting.

I'm just happy she's been able to have the kind of year, and her team has had the kind of year they've had. Tina desperately wants to win. She loves winning more than anything else. For her team to be No. 1 in the country and to be named the player of the year in the country, it's deserved on all fronts. She's a great kid and, I think, the best player.

I knew we would find a different Notre Dame team than the one we played at their place. I knew we would have to play a lot better than we did there. Our post players came up really big. It went exactly the way I thought it would except for the last five or six minutes, considering the kind of week we had.

In some places if you get to the Final Eight and lose to the No. 1 seed and win 32 games, there's 6,000 people waiting to meet you at the airport when you go home. But with us, with our tradition, people say, 'What happened?' We're just a team that came close . . . a team that almost had a chance to be great.

I remember saying that. It was right around the baseball playoffs. I always thought it was pretty cool how a manager would send a pitcher ahead to the next city to wait for his team. I wanted to give Will the opportunity to do that. Why sit around for five months doing nothing? I figured she could be up there scouting out the hotels and restaurants and sightseeing tours for us.

When you lose this game, there's nothing worse. There's nothing worse because this is the game that gets you to the place where all good things can happen. This is the hardest hurdle to get over, because you need 12 more months then to get back here and you didn't put yourself in a position to win the national championship.